All throughout my education writing and English have been my strong suits. The switch from creative into academic writing styles as I progressed in my education is a change that I’ve had to grow accustomed to and alter my writing style in some ways in order to progress as a writer in general. This specific class is furthering my writing abilities in that not only does it teach a research based style of academic writing, but also focuses on the importance of digital literacy and how to properly construct a website and how to write in digital spaces. This new emphasis on digital literacy is very new to me and thusly requires of me to get out of the comfort zone of traditional academic writing- trading in MLA formatted essays for blog posts. This class has already taught me a lot about research writing and about the actual research that goes into it. Having assignments like annotated bibliographies have done a lot to not only teach me the process of acquiring good scholarly information such as secondary or primary research from a scholarly source, but also has resulted in me- and my peers- being able to use one another’s personal research for our own research projects, but also learn from one another’s mistakes. Due to the experimental nature of this class, the whole thing for me so far has been a learning process and has revealed to me some discrepancies about my writing such as my lack of brevity when needed and my need to make my thesis and writing overall more clear. Although there have been times in this class alone where my writing has not met up to my best standards I have utilized some of the extra credit opportunities such as edits to my blog to make it more navigable and appealing to a browser. I’ve put a lot of effort into getting out of my comfort zone in this class by learning a new style of writing and changing my mode of publication of this writing. However, because of my adversity to this change in the beginning of the class some of my earlier works could use some of the revisions that were suggested on my Google Document.

Although not even halfway through this class has taught me a lot not only in an academic sense on how to construct an efficient scholarly website, and how to do good research, but how to objectively and constantly analyze the world around you, how everything has rhetoric and communicates something, and how something as simple as the architectural structure of a building, city, or even website can have significant meaning.